Re: A request for information please.

Stephen Harris wrote:
N wrote:
On 15 May, 23:44,


I think it is a lot easier to talk about how to do strong AI (mind)
than to actually accomplish anything. Maybe CAs will interest you.

Regards,
Stephen

Sergio Navega used to be a regular contributor to c.a.p. In this
paper he makes the point that the person who combines education
or reading along with practical experience is going to produce a
foundation for a deeper philosophical perspective than a person
who lacks such experience. He relates this to how an AI "ought"
to function.

http://www.intelliwise.com/reports/paper1.htm

"Later in this paper I will present some speculations on a
different point of view: that knowledge representation and
inference should be almost indistinguishable from one another
and the intelligence that a system presents is the result of
a _simultaneous_ _growth_ in its capacity to _represent_ and
_reason_. This approach seems to indicate the direction of
connectionist systems, in which this integration is achieved
naturally. In fact, several connectionists see no other way
of obtaining intelligence by other mechanisms. However, I
will suggest that it is possible to find non-connectionist
mechanisms that exhibit similar behavior, with the added
benefit of being more "economic" in terms of hardware
requirements(1). ... Thus, it seems unreasonable to ascribe
our distinguished intelligence just to better perceptual
capacity. But the fact is that we are more intelligent than
any other animal. There is, certainly, something more. What is
it? Is it language?
Could language explain our intelligence?

If language were on the center of our thinking, it obviously
would be all we need to transfer any kind of knowledge from
one person to another. This, indeed, seems obvious for a lot
of people. But this is not what happens in practice. Language's
most problematic characteristic is its difficulty in conveying
sensory experiences.

Have you tried to teach somebody to ride a bicycle using just
words? No, it's not possible. Without experimentation, without
feeling the difficulty to balance, the problem of coordinating
hands, feet, etc., one would not learn how to ride a bicycle.
The same happens when one is learning how to drive a car: you
can't do it "by the book", you have to get inside one and
exercise the controls. Make errors and learn to correct them.
Ditto for flying a plane. This knowledge is not acquirable just by reading. This knowledge is not transferable through language alone.

As we suggested in the previous section, human level intelligence demands human level sensory perception. But artificial intelligence
(in the same way that an airplane is an artificial bird) may
eventually be constructed even without all those sensory equipments.
It will not be able to perform like a human being, it will never understand some of our more "sensory" analogies, it will never understand our world the way we do. But my bet is that it will be
able to do a lot of useful things, like a reasonable level of natural language understanding, an intelligent (and comprehensible) teaching tutor, a creative (and amazing) assistant to the scientist, a (serious) centralizer of corporate knowledge, a worthwhile technical help desk (with infinite patience), etc. These are subsets of the old dreams of AI. And all of these applications seem to fundamentally require the basic principles that stand behind intelligence."

SH: Philosophy still seems worthwhile doing :-) This last paragraph
runs against the current AI tide of claiming that for an AI to work,
it must have input from external sensory data. Sergio says not so,
although less than fully featured, still quite useful, and perhaps
not requiring that a mind be instantiated to obtain that usefulness.

So N. there are lots of online papers which discuss points similar
to the ones you brought up in this thread, for instance, language.

Regards,
Stephen
.

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